Big, bigger, biggest

Although I knew, duh, that New York was the largest U.S. city, I did not realize until I got here and started paying attention quite how much it towers over the competition. The next largest, L.A., is not even half its size in terms of population. Brooklyn alone has a larger population than all the U.S. cities except L.A. and Chicago.
It's sort of mind-boggling, the vastness of this city, and yet most of the time I don't think about it all. (Except when we have to drive through it on the way to Connecticut, when it seems vast, annoying and even frightening: the dreaded BQE through Williamsburg and Queens; the Triborough Bridge, the endless Bronx. When we hit the Hutchison State Parkway, which marks the start of Westchester County and the end of New York City, I always feel like the journey is, essentially, over, even though there are two more hours to go.) Most of the time my world is work, in Midtown, and the enclave of Cobble Hill, Boerum Hill, Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn Heights. Of course we go places sometimes: to Coney Island for the bracing sea air, or the Upper East Side for the museums, or to Lower Manhattan to see a movie or to walk around looking at the cast-iron buildings in SoHo. But you can't take this city in in its entirety -- no one possibly could, except maybe Robert Moses.
When I first got to New York, the town was still in the running for the 2012 Olympics. Most people's reaction seened to be, Aren't there enough people, traffic jams and worries about terrorism in this town already? And we want to have an Olympics? And to me that sums up New York perfectly. Not the city that never sleeps, but the city that is too big to give a damn.